Understanding global climate change and local Belgian floods: the need for a micro-meso-macro critical discourse analysis

In July 2021, at the end of the Covid crisis, catastrophic floods affected a very local place in Belgium (and in Germany) with 37 lifes lost and several billions of destruction in the Vesdre valley, a periphery in Wallonia, the Southern part of the country. A catastrophic event caused by a singular meteorological event so far never recorded in recent history, which the infrastructures (major reservoirs) could not counter. The consequences were aggravated by the anarchic development of buildings in the valley during the last decennia and the high population of immigrant origin not acculturated to the risks of flooding in this valley and living in the cheap settlements while the more privileged groups had moved to the hillsides. The analysis of this event (which is still being processed after two years) requires a critical analysis to be carried out at several levels: the global level of climate change, European constrains and their impact on investment in critical infrastructure (reservoirs), federal and regional policies supposed intended to prepare the territory for demographic and social transitions, and finally local policies for preparing to face not so much so-called risk scenarios but episodes of unscripted turbulence. An analysis at these different levels requires the mobilisation of multiple reference disciplines: economics, climatology and the environment, engineering, public finance, demographics, spatial planning and crisis management. Each of these levels produces discourses anchored in distinct natural and political territories. Critical analysis requires highlighting at each level the stabilised dominant discourses whose rigidity does not allow them to accompany turbulent events, and the critical approaches mobilising other subjects, other framings. Rather than an global vision, we propose to develop an in-depth and critical analysis of these events and of the discourses mobilised by the different actors (with their specific references in terms of space and time periods) during and after the disaster makes it possible to highlight the points of tension between incompatible approaches, which are all potential sites of emergence. The article mobilizes large empirical data (particularly documentary search and interviews with citizens, public servants, and policy makers, mobilising the tools IPA ) which were gathered for policy analysis and evaluation since the events and for the development of new approaches in the management of civil protection. In line with the call, we consider “the micro, meso and macro levels at which policy ideas operate… unpacking the discursive processes that either sustain and naturalise them; or that hinder their contestation and disruption” within a multidimensional event analysis.